Author: Larrabee, Eric

Publication Year: 1972

Media Type: Report

Summary:

Abstract:

Address by the Director of the New York State Council on the Arts at the annual Member's Dinner of the Memorial Art Gallery of the University Rochester, Rochester, New York, May 14, 1973.

One way of measuring what the arts do, for example, is to imagine what might happen if they stopped doing it. I have used the phrase silent spring for the arts in the title of these remarks advisedly, to suggest some of the possibilities if the headlong progress of present events were to continue. Rachel Carson has given us a picture, terrifying in its implications and its particulars, of what will happen if we persist in our present abuse of the natural environment. We are also abusing our aesthetic environment. We are exhausting the cultural soil - riding roughshod over what little man-made or natural beauty we have, starving our artists, bankrupting our museums and orchestras and operas and theatre and dance ensembles. Miss Carson asked us to imagine a world devoid of the song of birds. We should no less be asked to imagine an America devoid of the arts, or of anything but the artistically shoddy and second-rate, which is almost worse than having no art at all.

Arts & Intersections:

Categories: Community Development